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Adaptive Journaling is a good return topic for someone who let a blog sit for three years.

Miss all here who kept tabs on each other’s blogs on sport, conditioning, and outdoors. Hope all are flourishing wherever you are.

Well, FYTD’s Chapter 3 is titled “Adaptive Journal Principle,” and is about keeping our physical conditioning lives alive in the imagination, not just in executive functioning.

My own journaling had become very “executive” these past few years — still using it — a graph paper formatted workbook approach to chronicling what I do as I do it. The little squares nicely recording the number of miles, reps, seconds, minutes, or whatever unit of action, performance, or time best describes my conditioning on any given day.

Still, the freedom and reflection of prose was missing.

Like most, my work life is something completely different than this blog topic and my book. Writing FYTD was about contributing to the solution of a major problem and certifying-up to be qualified to do so. I was happy enough that this adaptive conditioning path has stayed with me and hoped it would be a timeless book for self-led fitness and athleticism.

Then earlier this year, companies began calling me to partner with them to promote the book to publishers. I just ignored them, believing they were just middle-men trying to skim cash off the self-published.

Got me thinking though. If it can help others, maybe it is time to promote the philosophy of FYTD, a.k.a. adaptive training as published in 2013 and designed to be timeless.

As it happens, when I wrote my last post with the plan of writing biweekly, business endeavors long in the making — no kidding, there were others primary to this book — kicked into higher gear.

And I disappeared. Yet you all visited to encourage me on. Thanks, and I will look forward to catching up with you also.

Still living my training days…still following the path of adaptive, multi-dimensional training. Still remembering the days in 2007 when I began observing training needs in people, and studying, and formulating a written way that others could own to resolve their training lives; training for life, for sport, art, or work…

Will endeavor to drop in more often, and perhaps allow the posts themselves to determine their frequency. Some places along the training way…

It is just like I was as a kid, sitting before the test, remembering a passage read, and looking at multiple choice picks for what the title of the passage in the test question should have been…over thought it then, and…

Flashback to now.

What in the world do I name this book?

And is it worth re-titling?

Is it as simple as republishing a new edition with a different title?

And then, what do I do with the blog?

Maybe while I figure all of this out, I’ll get my camera fixed so I can post new visual content too. Can’t take good shots with what I’ve got.

The woman seated by me on the airplane was experienced in marketing words. Her confident conclusion was that Farm Your Training Day: An American Dream of Sustainable Personal Fitness is a bad title. Her tone was respectfully hushed, saving this unknown author from the ignominy of being known onboard as a bad-title-picker. I had visions of bad-title-air-marshals tackling me on the tarmac, and burning my books.

Truth is, my fellow passenger’s observation touched a nagging, bothersome, itchy insecurity I’ve often felt about my book title: if people have to read the book to get the title, that’s not a good title. The title is supposed to prompt people to dive into the book, not remain opaque to all who don’t first delve. A title should be a lead-in, and even if it’s semi-mysterious, its words should offer values that Gumby-ply the majority willpower to skate into that book. Is “Farm” such a word in the age of gaming and over-the-top pornification of just about everything except cereal (the sales of which are falling)? Well, maybe, a small voice counters, the extreme has been reached and the pendulum is returning to sanity, and in a sane world, farming is golden. Hmm.

Still, how many people would read my title and get it? And how many would go so far as to read the subtitle for clarification? My early assumption was that intrigued by the unusual title, they would certainly hone in on the subtitle. From the subtitle, they would have enough to prompt a quick “Look Inside” or a preview of sample pages. Then they’d be hooked!

Oh naïve self.

It is challenge enough for most people to finish a 279-page non-fiction book on new fitness philosophy without pictures that isn’t by an author with a Beverly-Hills-Household-brand-name like “Yogi Effuzio Zeus-Nero, former Navy SEAL,” or the like. I mean, I wanted to write an entrepreneurial mind-body conditioning book that provides an adaptive training catalyst for readers, not ensnare their self-critical envy for my beach-body, then move to Venice beach once I made it. I just want to afford to be able to travel and see our extended family more often while enabling all of us to be home more of the time. But I wanted to give something of quality to get there.

Maybe the Farm Your Training Day terminology in my book title is so smart, it’s dumb. The title tracks the adaptive principles and dimensions within that so broadly and deeply empower readers to trail blaze their own multidisciplinary training lives. That’s smart. The book is a reader-catalyst for achieving consistency with lifelong room to grow and modify one’s training life. Isn’t that what you’d expect from an adaptive fitness philosophy? That’s smart. The farming analogy is good for the reader because it does not create a need then sell to fulfill it. There is no fad-branded co-dependency with adaptive training. Instead, my book reveals that you already own what you need to exceed what any fad could ever sustain. All you’ve got to start with is the truth: you own your farm and your role as farmer of your mind-body. That is smart. And yet, true, smart concepts require implementation, and that’s what the 279-pages get at. But this fitness philosophy book does not market so well, since marketing is about stoking immediate-gratification impulses. As a marketing tool, my book is dumb.

Still, farming the mind-body recruits the readers’ minds and imaginations, something that teaches readers to fish for life by internalization while not giving them step-by-step photos they never have the patience to follow, being tantamount to serving-up cold fish they never finish cooking. Don’t shove knowledge at me, teach me how better to learn! Once readers use this catalyst to excel, they will hopefully overcome my sorry-title with solid reviews, and I’ll find my salary modestly paid before I die.

The scale of beginner to elite-level training is for readers to determine and navigate after consultation with their health care advisors, but my book’s baseline principles and training dimensions bring all readers to a zone of sustainable self-training consistency that forms their own unique, solid launching pad. The currently served, over-served, and underserved all stand to benefit from Farm Your Training Day. And the adaptive principles and dimensions don’t apply to physical training alone. They can apply to work, art, and service. There are takeaways for everyone.

The point of my book is not ‘who am I’ and never was. The point of my book is and has been, to help resolve roadblocks to wellness and conditioning in a country more flush with fitness brands than ever, but whose population continues upward in the obesity, overweight, and depression statistics. My answer, as may shock publishing houses, editors, and agents, comes from an ordinary person who researched, tested, and wrote the book with no intention of creating codependency on my brand for future training inspiration, but with the intention of empowering readers with a single purchase to become independent self-training athletes for-life, whose sports, arts, and physical work forms are their own. Blasphemy!

My approach is a catalyst for self-training ownership never to be co-dependent on contracts, subscriptions, fad-brands, or personalities to ascend to lifelong wellness, functional fitness, and improved performance in sport, art, and work. Time will tell if “farming” is a time-tested model for our training lives, and whether mass-corporate farming is any better than small, local, organic farming tailored to each individual and in the individual’s conscious control.

When you’re overweight: there is the you that tethers your mind and emotions about your body to your body, holding it down, and vice versa.

Then there is the you capable of sensing your separateness from your own body that respects what the body can do if allowed.

This is your spirit that can untie your body from the current emotional state to let it move. It’s kind of like taking your dog for a walk when you feel half asleep. Or letting the parking brake off of your car. Or stepping up during an emergency.

The part of you who rises above the emotion-shackled body and body-shackled emotional state is the athletic spirit, the worker’s ethic, and the artists inspiration. This you is capable of adaptive training.

Turns out, freed from the body-mind and its every notion about the body (from aches to analyses) the emotions will serve the athletic spirit. Once moving, these two will lead the mind and body to freedom and greater well being.

Cover the big rocks first in your priority flow…little ones will follow on soon enough.

I’ve seen the apology and non-apology posts for no blogging. Remembering those, and remembering that I was not terribly worried that someone had not blogged regularly enough (unless maybe I knew they had a health challenge of some kind and there was a sudden change), I’ll not make a big deal out of my down-tempo in blogging.

That is consistent with the principles in my book for remaining consistent anyhow.

One of the principles of adaptive training, i.e. Farming the Training Day, is adaptive journaling and recording of the training events and training days we undertake as adaptive athletes.

Recording results is more or less data keeping and tracking progress using training metrics that matter to your goals. Still, bear in mind that if you’re crunched on time because life demands it, it’s more important that your body absorbs training of the quality needed at the moment than that you record every detail, or train in accordance with what you want to record. You may later catch up with estimates. That is not a problem so long as self-honesty guides your estimates.

Journaling is different. Journaling is more of your own personal sense and prose-flow-think-through about your training quality, experience, and the state of you. That too may be embraced or shelved, but let’s not let the recording and thinking about what we do be a prerequisite to freely doing what’s good for us and others. So, if being with others who need me is more important than thinking-through my training experience this day, I’ll shelve the journal or the blog or the data checklist, training, and then get back to my people.

That is what adaptive training does from my humble perspective. Can we be flexible enough to admit to ourselves that everything material and energetic in and around us changes, moves, and many of these states of being are temporary? When we do, we get a better sense of the value of completing our training, and sustaining the quality of life it was meant to support by keeping balance.

A kind of humorous skit could be made to illustrate this by imagining an action movie where the hero is training like a champion. A speeding train is heading for a broken track and the hero is called. “Not now,” he says. “I’m in the middle of a training routine, can’t you see that?”

So that is a comical illustration of what it might look like if we put off someone we love or someone who depends on us so that we can complete our training day according to some kind of inflexible regimen we establish, but that does not necessarily serve the best interests of our lives.

10 adaptable, customizable principles, and 7 training dimensions / evolutions that provide a broad and deep base for whatever you’re training for, in sport, arts, or work. This is a book that harmonizes training philosophy and practical, very simple takeaways for sustaining a consistent, building, growing training life. Cheers!

If you delve into your least favored training areas, be it endurance, primary muscle strength, core strength, or application in sports, arts, or work, you will be raising the level of your foundational condition.

Let tedium become self-training in the gift of focus.

Let hardship be your elevator.

Let slowness be your path to thoroughness in preparation, and prevention.

It’s an applied philosophy book with lifelong principles to take with you, practical idea catalysts for you to customize your training life, with enough depth and breadth to remain a long term resource.

Yesterday was a sound strength training day, and I found myself reflecting on this thought stream from a recent hike, simplified below:

Truth is so effectual, it needs no anger, pride, fear, or weaponized delivery to be heard. It only needs the telling absent those things, and if possible in love and humility, to resound, reverberate, be received, taken to heart, and possibly passed down for generations.”

As I reflected on this, I realized it has great potential for adaptive training, that is, slipping the punches to self and others that come with anger and fear attached to:

(1) the avoidance of some truth about self, or

(2) fearful or vengeful anger at those who are a source of injustices toward others, self, and worst of all, those we love.

How often does truth go untold or told to shut-ears because the mixture of fear and anger allowed to crowd out the simple, powerful, healing, even nucleus-changing truth?

The truth in matters of all sizes may be scorched, burned, or concealed in the fire and smoke of passions that crowd it, from fear to anger to pride to disgust.

And yet, the simple truth, said, in love and humility, will free the teller as much as those who can hear that truth told. And each one of us will be able to hear it when this untarnished, nourishing truth arrives.

Imagine what energy comes from a body, mind, and spirit un-fettered by fear of the truth, embracing the truth, and working truth through the whole being with every footstep, movement, and every labor.

Look at how truth-to-self was able to do the unexpectedly unthinkably powerful:

By writing this post, I am not claiming I could do what these two women did in their grace and forgiveness, in part imparted through many, in both cases from higher places spacious enough to deliver freedom from the intrinsic assault of traumatic injustice.

I don’t claim any foresight in the field of forgiveness, but I do see a simple truth grasped personally by these two women which makes me wonder…

If much simpler truths about self, or what we witness in the misuse of power were not sources of fear, were unburdened by anger, and unpolluted by pride; if simple truth were told in love however love would wisely tell the simple truths, how much harm, hurt, suffering, and injustice could be extinguished, prevented, and instead nourishing relationships and virtues grown instead?

Plant your training efforts in time and space, and watch yourself grow. Nurture these actions with good eating, sleeping, and drinking habits as you would water and feed crops. Harvest the bounty when the time is right, by executing your sport, art, or work better than before. Share the yield and nourish others with your gains.

Two posts ago, you may have watched Rocky Marciano kicking a medicine ball back to a trainer who threw it at his feet, doing a modified, repetitive rocking crunch at a fast clip for some functional impact, timing, muscle, and perhaps plyometric work. The cardiovascular benefits no doubt would track tempo, duration, and force.

Let’s take a soft medicine ball into a new context. We begin with a weight right for us. We take the medicine ball to a wall or pillar, where we will hold it against the pillar or wall with our upper back, head, neck, chest, well, really, any part of our body we want, with the objective of not letting it fall to the ground.

Go for time. How long can we keep it moving without it dropping? As it rolls up, sideways, down, diagonally, in curves, and countless configurations, our bodies must adapt to keep it there.

This is relative to mental and physical conditioning, for the person with lesser conditioning, if their body then mind gives way earlier than those more advanced in body and mind training, the spirit kicks in sooner. And for the advanced athlete, warrior, whatever…later, perhaps.

Will we ever come to the point where we run, perform, act, compete, work, and achieve from this state of being from the beginning of the effort, mind and body moved efficiently from this zone in our being? That would be a breakthrough. What endurance, strength, and other qualities would be possible then? Where are the limits? I guess we really don’t know yet, and that is an exciting frontier that those of us in a boundary set world can escape to every day.

Complete your muscle movements as fluidly and naturally as water moves.

Five-hundred-fifty muscle movements by day’s end. The exercises varied, 1/5 were weighted, while most were body-weight. This is a average number for this kind of training day, on the low side. Still, all major muscle groups engaged the Earth. A building block, a place holder, a training day, and then, nutrition.

Instead of pizza bread sticks, took the remaining fresh Portabella mushrooms, sliced them, drizzled olive oil on them, and sprinkled some mozzarella on them, and put them in the residual heat of the convection oven after the pizzas were done and staying warm.

Leafing backward in the book of the day, nutrition page…

Breakfast had been fresh blueberries, raspberries, banana, and spelt bread with honey. Tried some pumpkin seeds on the side. Lunch had been sunflower seed butter sandwich. If I’d had alfalfa sprouts on hand, I’d have added ’em on.

Or is there a perfect child, or grandparent, or wife, husband, girlfriend, boyfriend, or friend?

There are so many good, for the good makes room for a small, small world of countless differences.

Perfection, philosophers assure us, is the enemy of the good. Yet it is good to excel. What do we excel toward? Perfection. Then how is perfection the enemy of the good again?

Because while we excel toward perfection, perfection is not the goal. Perfection is a divine gift, an ideal that British radar pioneer Robert Watson-Watt said, “never comes.” I believe he should have said, “..in this life,” but that’s quibbling with his context. Also, there is an exception to every rule, and perhaps an exception to that rule too.

Perfection evades our grasp as entropy dogs us, the unexpected delays us, or survival challenges tax us. Yes, attachment to this world seems to anchor us down, unable to fly up to havens of perfection.

All the dreams of perfection we want, such as immortality, eternal love, and inalienable acceptance are retirement benefits that vest only after our own personal work as the farmers of our souls and as helpers of our fellow farmers, is done. And the work is only done when we die, true? At the end of this life, everything takes extra work. Just ask those living into the golden years. Earthly retirement is not real retirement, for the work goes on!

Living and dying while struggling to excel in goodness-for-goodness-sake is the work of our lives that we can and must excel at. Genuineness in this quest can’t be faked, and comes with letting go of desiring and grasping, yet receiving all blessings thankfully with hands that multiply and distribute them to others. Some call this renunciation of self, yet it is more. It is giving of self, enlarging one’s heart by letting go, and expanding in spiritual freedom and vitality by giving.

Death is retirement from this noble work in this life. Afterward, retirement benefits kick in, that is, the Divine Gift (some believe by other agencies) of immortality goes to those who farmed within their hearts the seeds of goodness. There is more wisdom in our entropic bodies than meets the eye, as they fertilize with humility the spiritual seeds for resurrection and eternal life awaiting the Sunrise. Eventually, the Harvester of growing crops comes and transplants them where all are nourished without eating, and there is no entropy or waste. People of love rise again and the Spirit says, “It’s all good.”

So let go of grasping for receiving, and grasp your partner to dance, or grab a hand and pull someone up who is down, or grab a rock and pull yourself up for a better view by which to navigate for a greater purpose and destination than temporary self satisfaction. We handle the good to give, not to keep, but to share and distribute once it has taught us what we are to learn on the day. We excel each time we do this. We plant new seeds and make our fields more fertile with humility each time we do this.

And how will we know when we are prepared enough? When we’re done. When our spirits have left our broken bodies. How does that all work? I believe we’ll find out. Until then, let’s help and inspire each other. Let’s imbue each other with value, making value, multiplying value, and giving the value of love and all of its goods to one another, and do so for our entire lives.

“You are training in relative motion to two hands moving on a clock face; to the spin of the Earth circling the sun; to galaxies plunging through space. You are training relative to other people, animals, energies, matter, weather elements, and events.”